On the day when net immigration in the UK hit the extraordinary level of 330,000, the Institute of Directors warned that the government’s increasingly desperate and ad hoc measures to try to stem the tide were threatening to damage British business. They’re right, of course, but they haven’t carried their analysis through, and realised that the real problem (as with so many issues) starts with our EU membership.

David Cameron has repeatedly promised (“no if, no buts”) to get immigration down to “tens of thousands”. Yet the real figure keeps going up, with “European citizens” (and especially Romanians and Bulgarians) strongly represented.

Cameron is caught in a pincer movement, a double bind. On the one hand, net immigration from the EU keeps going up, and as long as we’re EU members, there’s nothing he can do about it. His proposed changes to welfare rules are merely fiddling at the margin. What did he expect, when the minimum wage in the UK is many times average wages in Eastern Europe? The EU’s “free movement” rules might have worked when all member-states had broadly similar levels of prosperity, but the moment you add large numbers of poor people into the mix, there is a huge incentive for people to move from poor to richer countries.

So on the other hand, all Cameron can do is to suppress immigration from the rest of the world, including the Commonwealth. He is forced to operate a highly discriminatory policy where we are obliged to accept unskilled Romanians (who are broadly white), but forced to refuse highly-qualified people from (say) the Indian sub-continent, who might make an important contribution to our economy.

So the IoD is quite right: we’ve made it too difficult to bring in necessary skills for our industry (there’s a big issue of why we don’t train enough people with the necessary skills in the UK, but that’s a different and longer-term question). We’ve given ourselves a policy that represents the worst of both worlds. We get far too many people, often with difficult language and cultural issues, but we can’t select the skills we need, and the average quality of immigrants is far too low.

And the vital point, which we in UKIP must make over and over as we approach the referendum, is that our membership of the EU is the problem.

We will demand a policy where we first seek to reach a broad national consensus on the numbers we can accept each year without undue strain on social cohesion and social infrastructure. Without being unduly prescriptive, this is likely to be (in Cameron’s phrase) in the tens of thousands. Then we will operate a points system, as Australia does, to ensure we get the best value from those who we accept, and ensure that industry gets the skills it needs.

Once we get a grip on the numbers, we may well find we have elbow-room to accept modest numbers of refugees from war zones and troubled areas of the world. But the message for Angela Merkel is this: while net immigration driven by EU policy stands at 330,000, we have no room to share her refugee burden.

13 Responses to IoD warns on immigration

Agreed. But we are fast approaching the time when immigrants will become the dominant group in the UK (and particularly in England), as our indigenous fertility rates are well below a figure needed for the culture to be sustained. Many immigrants, particularly Moslems, have a much higher fertility rate and with this will come a massive change to society as we understand it at present. We should be leaving the EU now not in some years’ time as by then it could well be too late to make the needed adjustments to immigration figures so as to sustain our democratic and libertarian culture. By leaving the political side of the EU we will have choice – at the moment we don’t.

100% the same as the U.S. – to look tough on immigration they make it impossible for British and European immigrants, or at least very expensive. Most companies now write a disclaimer on the job descriptions that they will no longer sponsor visas even. However, the problem with US immigration is obviously the Southern border, of which no politician is really willing to really touch. Except for Donald Trump, who is a clown but has captured the public imagination with this issue

This has gone down really well here…not!……A Commonwealth country no less
By the way Canada is the same as Australia in operating a points system, our age reduced our points for coming here in 2006 but we had enough dosh to ensure we would not be a burden on the Canadian taxpayer, this is what countries who run themselves can do. The downside can ridiculous though, we recently had a case where a ten year old was excluded from joining her family because she is deaf but otherwise healthy, she was deemed to be a future burden on the health care scheme, but after years massive protests was allowed in. Needless to say…we all have to have medicals before being allowed to stay in the country and rightly so.

Canada had its anti immigration thing in the late 70’s. I was offered a job with CAE Flight Simulation in Quebec and didn’t take it. Seems they couldn’t get their youth to work that much? That kinda bothered me.

Anyway, during that time there was a large demonstration (punch up) or three with Brit construction workers somewhere there. Remember it well cos the BBC told us in the analogue fashion.

Yes my ex husband went to Quebec in the 70’s and although he was recruited by a Canadian company who wanted Brits with his expertise it was clear that anyone from the UK was not welcomed and before I and our two daughters could join him he left and came home!
The rest of the country is more welcoming….provided you fit the criteria for the points system or are financially independent and also have no health issues.

Thats interesting Jane…and I know from the Canadians in that company I met 10 yrs later that I should of gone really. Some Brits they employed put me off this time around. Lets say awkward, not me of course?

I later had an opportunity with NASA in Australia. That was outside Canberra which was not on my list of places for a speed boat and wrong sand. Deep Space Telescopes are not built near seas, unfortunately for me.

I bounced off emigration a few times and was largely due to the value I felt UK had at the time. Well, some of it was still apparent.

A bit late,but have just looked up the population densities of a few countries for 2013/14,
ENGLAND 413 PER Sq KILOMETRE
Germany 227 ” ” ”
France 120 ” ” ”
and we all know where most of these “migrants” would like to come to,Merkel shut mouth
and fill up your own country first,don`t forget about all those refugees we took in some
80 or so years ago,no wonder you have so much space!